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Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Paying attention to your body can increase resilience to stress

Resilience is the ability to rapidly return to normal, both physically and emotionally, after a stressful event. Reynolds points to work by Haase et al., who provide fMRI evidence that in high resilience individuals brain areas receiving signals from the body become more active during stress and supress signals to brain areas that intensify body arousal. Individuals with lower resilience show reduced attention to bodily signals but greater neural processing to aversive bodily perturbations. Here's the Haase et al. abstract:

Highlights

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Low resilience individuals are less sensitive to body-relevant information.
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Low resilience individuals show an exaggerated brain response to an aversive interoceptive stimulus.
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This mismatch between attention to and processing of interoceptive afferents may result in poor adaptation in stressful situations.

Abstract

This study examined neural processes of resilience during aversive interoceptive processing. Forty-six individuals were divided into three groups of resilience Low (LowRes), high (HighRes), and normal (NormRes), based on the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (2003). Participants then completed a task involving anticipation and experience of loaded breathing during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) recording. Compared to HighRes and NormRes groups, LowRes self-reported lower levels of interoceptive awareness and demonstrated higher insular and thalamic activation across anticipation and breathing load conditions. Thus, individuals with lower resilience show reduced attention to bodily signals but greater neural processing to aversive bodily perturbations. In low resilient individuals, this mismatch between attention to and processing of interoceptive afferents may result in poor adaptation in stressful situations.